AN UNCOMMON THOUGHT

"The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery."

-Fred Alan Wolf

06 July 2017

Searching.

The 16th-century John Dee was a magician in the court of Elizabeth I, a man who had conversations with angels, an astrologer once imprisoned for predicting Queen Mary Tudor’s death through her horoscope, and a spy.

He signed his coded name as 007, a sign-off which later inspired Ian Fleming’s character James Bond. Despite this litany of lore, much of the real life of John Dee remains a mystery, one which researchers are helping to unravel with the reassembly of his library.

With their beautiful typography and delicate, enigmatic scribbles in the margin, John Dee's books show the movements of this searching Renaissance mind as it makes sense of its world, line by line.